Canon TS-E 24mm f/3.5L II

If you aren’t sure what this is, you don’t want it.

Released to rave reviews, the MK II version of Canon’s 24mm Tilt-Shift lens has several marked improvements over the previous version. The most dramatic change is the tilt and shift axes can be independently rotated between themselves and the camera body, rather than remaining at 90 degrees as the previous version (and all other tilt-shift lenses) required. There are also multiple aspherical and UD glass elements, curved aperture blades, ‘sub-wavelength’ coatings, virtually everything in the lens-design book.

Roger’s Take: Amazingly sharp, amazingly wide, absolutely no chromatic abberation, exceedingly well built. The new Canon TS-Es are as good as anything available in the genre. And you can tilt, shift, and change the planes of each relative to each other. If you have tilt-shift experience this lets you do remarkable things. If your tilt-shift challanged (this would be me) you can still do remarkable things. Once. Then you can spend the next two hours figuring out how you did that.

But to be honest, both the 24 f3.5 and 17 f4 TS-E lenses are so sharp I sometimes take them in place of another prime to shoot as regular lenses – they’re just that good. And then you can do the tilt-shifty thingamabob and get some really amazing depth of field, slam home a quick panorama, straighten up tall buildings, or just get a very cool effect.